


Human is a State of Being

by DarkWolfMoon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bucky has no trigger words, DUM-E brings the best presents, M/M, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Iron Man 1, Tony is such a mom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23023345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkWolfMoon/pseuds/DarkWolfMoon
Summary: Tony made DUM-E in one of his engineering blackouts. He doesn't know what all went into the little guy, he just knows he's bound to have a few quirks.The Asset was sent on a routine mission. This mission is a little less routine when he is approached by a polite one-armed robot that apparently thinks they are related.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Tony Stark
Comments: 32
Kudos: 444
Collections: Tony Stark winter soldier





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RayShippouUchiha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RayShippouUchiha/gifts).



> First of all, happy birthday, Ray! I know it's going to be a little late for you, but I had six different projects all screaming at me for attention, two of which are variations of a one-shot I was going to write for you, but they weren't coming out quite right, so I went back to this one, which was my original intention!
> 
> Now, I can't currently find the post, but I remember seeing something on Tumblr a while back about DUM-E latching onto the Winter Soldier because they both have a metal arm, which obviously means that Tony made Winter. Tony is understandably confused by his little robot bringing him a tall, musclebound dude with a metal arm, but he rolls with it.
> 
> My brain doesn't do anything small. I have a one-shot that is almost 40k words for a fairly simple idea. I didn't have a prayer the moment my brain said this was set before Howard and Maria were killed. It spawned an entire thing that is this. Hope you enjoy.
> 
> Also, I didn't use a beta unless you count text-to-speech, which is actually really useful for checking if things sound right. So if there are mistakes, that's all on me.

When Tony was honest with himself, he wasn't entirely sure what he'd been thinking when he'd made DUM-E. According to Howard, he hadn't been thinking, and he sure as hell shouldn't have been doing it in his father's lab. But the little robotic arm was special, made from something Tony could never articulate. There was a sort of patience and care in his design that Tony didn't consciously remember doing. He'd had engineering blackouts before, moments when he couldn't remember how he had constructed the finished product in front of him. But this was different. Usually, it was something destructive he made, taking up his father's tools which were all geared toward creating more efficient and damaging explosives, he couldn't help making a similar result. And he wasn't blind to the fact that his father took whatever tool of destruction he'd made and handed it to the company under his own name. That hurt a bit, but it was the closest thing to pride Tony had come to expect from his father.

But DUM-E was different, and he didn't know why. He was made from the same tools he always used, but Tony couldn't believe for a moment that the little robot that followed him around like a puppy had even an ounce of destruction in his chassis. And he wasn't sure when he started referring to DUM-E as he, but Rhodey was the one to draw his attention to it.

"He's kind of like your son, isn't he?" Rhodey said, grinning at the earnest little robot as he edged ever closer to Tony's worktable in the MIT mechanics labs.

Tony had brought DUM-E along more to prove a point than anything else. The mechanics professor was saying that robots weren't nearly advanced enough for independent action yet. DUM-E had proven that wrong by examining, activating, and ultimately falling in love with the lab's fire extinguisher. (Tony had brought DUM-E to MIT because, his father's tools or not, he was not going to let Howard deconstruct the little robot without a fight.)

"What do you mean?" Tony asked, trying to ignore the way DUM-E was crowding his elbow as he tried to finish the circuit he was working on. This was going to be another one, proof that Tony could repeat his success with another robot while he could remember doing it. That DUM-E would have another robot to hang out with was just a happy side-effect of it.

"You identified a gender for him, talk to him as if he's a person, and you worry about him more than you worry about any living being, including yourself. If that's not some kind of parenthood, my mom must have been lying to me. And my mom never lies about stuff like that."

"She never lies about anything, to hear you tell it," Tony muttered. He put down the soldering tool before DUM-E got too close. While it probably wouldn't hurt him, Tony and Rhodey were much less damage resistant. Not to mention the professor was looking for ways to lock Tony out of the manufacturing labs for showing him up like that, and getting hurt because of a curious robot would be just the sort of thing he would jump on to push that ban through.

"No, she doesn't," Rhodey huffed. "And I don't appreciate your insinuations that she does."

It was a rather naive way to look at the world, to Tony's mind. Parents lied about something, even if it was as simple as the existence of Santa Claus. Usually the lies were bigger and more involved, meant to 'protect' them. Howard never cared about him enough to tell lies like that. He went straight for the bigger ones, claiming he hadn't stolen any of Tony's designs, that he was smarter than Tony. Still, Tony knew that not everyone was like Howard. He'd met Mrs. Rhodes, and she was brusque and refreshing in her approach to him. He wasn't Howard's son around her, he was just Tony, her son's best friend.

Still, if that was what parenthood was supposed to be, he wasn't sure if he should be terrified or search for a better definition, because he was not ready to be a parent, certainly not with Howard as his most recent and obvious example of what fatherhood was supposed to entail.

He turned to look at DUM-E, the cleverly stupid little robotic arm he had constructed in a haze of engineering imperative. The thought of being Howard to this fragile little intelligence he had somehow created had his throat closing up in panic and something awful roiling in his gut.

"And you're making another one, aren't you," Rhodey stated more than asked. He was always too perceptive for Tony to get his usual bullshit by him. "You're making a friend for your mechanical son."

"Shut up," Tony hissed, even as DUM-E started beeping excitedly. He wouldn't yell, though. He refused to yell around DUM-E, not until DUM-E would be able to tell the difference between anger and fear. Howard hadn't done that for him, and he was almost certain that was why he was as screwed up as he was, unable to recognize when someone hated him because they were jealous or because he had actually done something wrong.

Rhodey looked properly apologetic to that. "I didn't realize it was supposed to be a surprise."

"Well, it's not anymore." Tony turned to DUM-E, who had edged even closer and was examining the pieces on the worktable. "It'll be a while," he told the little robot. "But eventually, yeah. There'll be another like you running around here."

DUM-E focused on the circuit board that was slowly becoming the new robot's brain. The enquiring beeps were adorable, though Tony refused to admit that in front of Rhodey. He knew better than to give his best friend any more ammunition than he had to. There was a whole roll of film somewhere that Rhodey called "Proof Tony Stark is a Human Being Too" that Tony hadn't managed to find and destroy yet.

"I'm gonna need you to back off a bit, bud," he told DUM-E, ignoring the way Rhodey was snorting beside him. "Why don't you go explore the campus for a bit? Find all sorts of things you can show your new sibling when I finally get them up and running."

"Sibling?"

Tony didn't even have to look to know that Rhodey was waggling his eyebrows at him. "Shut the fuck up, Rhodey. It's shorthand for sibling unit, as in one of a type like him." Behind him, he was hyperaware of the way DUM-E was moving to the far end of the mechanics lab. "No, stupid, that's a closet. The door out is over there."

Obligingly, the little robot spun around quickly before making for the correct door this time.

"God, I hope he doesn't get into a lot of trouble."

Rhodey snorted. "Yeah, that right there? Not helping your case here."

"I am not DUM-E's dad!"

"Okay, you're not his dad."

Tony glanced at Rhodey. He never gave up so easily. Tony was missing something, and whatever it was, it was about to bite him in the ass. Even if he didn't know Rhodey as well as he did, the shit-eating grin on his face was a dead giveaway.

"You're much more like a mom."

"We're friends, so I'm going to give you a five second head start before I murder you," Tony said blandly.

"You know you love me."

"I'm starting to doubt that right now."

"But you love your baby more." He still had the grin on his face. Because he knew Tony wasn't going to do anything about it.

He wondered if Rhodey would realize it was revenge when Tony replaced every box of cereal in his cupboards with Kix and every can in the pantry with tomato soup. The food would be held for ransom until Rhodey apologized or broke down and ate his least favorite foods for at least a week.

Tony wondered which would happen first.

* * *

The Asset had finished setting up his target for assassination and was attempting to blend into the campus. It was proving slightly difficult as black, which in other situations allowed him to disappear into the shadows, seemed to make him stick out in the sea of discordant colors. While he had considered securing similar clothing, he found the variety of colors and styles distasteful. That he had formed an opinion of a sort, albeit on clothing, likely meant he would be reprogrammed on completion of the assignment.

The target was a professor of bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was not necessary for the Asset to know more than that. Something had put him on HYDRA's radar, and it was for the Asset to take him off it again in a permanent fashion. With everything in place, the only thing left to do was monitor the situation to ensure that the mission was completed. It would be an unfortunate accident, nothing more, and the Asset would return to HYDRA as he always did.

The Asset entered the library, collected a small stack of books, and set up a surveillance near one of the windows overlooking the parking lot. He skimmed over the information in the text and wrote important points down in a notebook. Nothing in the books was mission required, but the appearance of a productive student served his surveillance well, as long as the subject didn't interfere with the mission itself.

He sat there for three hours collecting notes on the Enigma machine, the basics of coding, and cognitive development as it pertained to the formation of one's identity. The Asset was not sure why such a text was among those he had collected. He knew his Handler would not be happy to discover that he had read it.

An insistent voice in his head attempted to push him towards exploring that understanding. It asked why they would be concerned with him thinking about identity.

He replied that the Asset was not meant to have an identity at all, as this was a sign of a malfunction that needed to be corrected.

 _Well,_ the voice continued. _It's too bad you have one whether you want it or not._

The Asset wasn't sure what this was supposed to mean. The Asset did not want to know what this was supposed to mean. But perhaps it had something to do with the preferences he had observed in himself. Including the preference to avoid the Chair.

 _Now you're getting it,_ the voice whispered. _They're going to destroy us both again, and we both know it._

'Again'. The word caused a sudden flash of pain with no apparent source, a flickering of images and sensations. The Asset did not show this weakness. He could not afford to, not in the middle of the mission, not in a public place that would draw attention. The pain came from somewhere in the yawning void beneath the mission. Part of him was certain that something had been there before, but for the Asset there had only been the mission and the void. When the mission was complete, only the void remained, echoing with the orders of his Handler. Only the void could remain.

But the void was filled with things that meant something. One of the theories he had noted down spoke of stages of development, milestones that needed to be reached and understood before the next stage could be achieved. It correlated the stages with specific ages and—

The Asset did not have an age. The Asset understood the flow of time but could not place himself within it. He could not recall any of the developmental stages he had noted, but somehow, he had reached the final stage, the capacity to form, test, and carry out theories. He was capable of abstract thought, of planning for something that might not come to pass. This was, in fact, everything that was expected of him as the Asset. He did not recall learning it or living it. He had always been the Asset; he had always understood this.

Perhaps he was constructed this way. Dredged up from the yawning void was the idea that he, the Asset, was forged, constructed from pieces. Perhaps there was some truth to that.

His attention was diverted to movement in the parking lot below and he watched as the professor of bioengineering got into his car and started it up. There was a small explosive charge attached to the underside of the vehicle. As soon as the target reached a specific point in his journey—five miles from the school—it would enter the broadcast zone of a radio transmitting the detonation sequence. The Asset would not be seen in the area, the target would be eliminated, and the mission would be complete.

He stood from his place by the window and put the books on a cart labelled for re-shelving. If the mission was not yet complete, he would need to be redeployed by the Handler. If the mission was completed as it was meant to be, it would be finished, and the Asset would return to the Handler anyway. Either way, he was required to return to base.

He attempted to cross the campus at a sedate pace, neither hurrying nor entirely aimless. He achieved the stride he was after as he was passing the engineering building. The Asset kept his attention on his stride and the path he was following, noting people and things in the efficient and methodical way he had been trained to.

The robot trundling along the path towards him was odd but nonthreatening. As he moved to get out of its way, the sleeve of his jacket became caught between plates in his metal arm. The sunlight glinted off the panels of his exposed wrist, and the nonthreatening robot suddenly swiveled its arm around close to his hand.

The Asset immediately moved to cover his metal wrist. This was meant to be a covert mission, and anyone seeing his arm—robot or otherwise—would compromise that intention.

It appeared to be too late, however, as the robot released a strange warbling beep. Now that the Asset was paying attention to the robot, he saw a small camera attached to the top of the extendable arm. It moved the camera closer to his arm.

With a gentleness the Asset hadn't expected, the robot closed the metal hand at the end of the arm around his hand, lifting it and by extension his arm up where it was more visible. It twisted it first one way, then the other, letting out another of the warbling beeps, then one that sounded more like a question than an expression of awe.

What did it say about the Asset that he could almost understand the robot?

The robot released his hand and spun in a quick circle before reaching for him again. The claw at the end of the arm stopped just shy of touching him.

 _So it's a polite robot,_ said the strange inner voice. _That's new._

The Asset would be wiped for admitting it aloud, but he was curious. The gesture was simple enough to interpret. The robot wanted to hold his wrist. And it had left the decision to him.

He should go. The Asset would be expected back at base soon, either for redeployment or temporary retirement. But something he couldn't explain held him there, staring at the expectant claw of the robot.

It could be a test. His Handler had tested him upon establishing himself as Handler. This could be just another test.

 _Would HYDRA send a robot like this?_ the voice demanded. _Does that seem like something they would do?_

From the tone of the voice, it didn't believe they would. But if this was real, if this wasn't a test...

It was a decision in his hands, a decision that didn't have nor did it apparently require the input of his Handler. This was his decision.

Slowly, he let go of his metal wrist and moved his flesh hand away so the robot could get that further inspection.

 _And if it's a trap,_ the voice added, _there's not much more they can do to us._

The robot's claw closed around his wrist and the robot began to pull him along towards the engineering building. While the Asset knew he could dig in his heels or break out of the grip should he choose to, the curiosity that caused him to give in to the robot's polite request was still within him. And, as the voice said, the only circumstance sufficiently sub-optimal to his current situation was death. He was reasonably certain he would be able to avoid death, but it was worth the risk to discover what was going on. The best way to understand what was going on was to follow it back to its source, and that was where he assumed the robot was leading him.

He was dragged into the engineering building by the robot and down one of the hallways. From the signs, he was able to narrow the possible destinations to somewhere in Computer Programming or the recently added robotics labs, which had been worked into a couple of the lecture classrooms at the end of the building.

As they passed the last of the programming classrooms, the Asset supposed it was to be expected that the robot had come from and was returning to the robotics lab. It didn't tell him what to expect, but he had some idea of the sort of environment he was going to encounter.

The Asset experienced a sudden flash of memory that caused his steps to falter. This went unnoticed by the robot, who continued to pull him along. Perhaps his Handler had come to him. Perhaps the robotics lab at the end of the building contained a Chair.

Suddenly the risk involved didn't seem as worth it to him. It was too late to protest or pull away though, as the robot released his arm to open the door of the robotics lab and release another warble that somehow managed to sound excited.

The room did not contain a Chair. Instead, it was full of individual workstations. Most of these were empty except for the one the robot gravitated toward. This station had two people at it, and one of them...

 _What the hell?_ his inner voice muttered. _That's a fucking kid._

Though he wouldn't express the sentiment aloud, the Asset agreed with the voice's assessment. It was, indeed, a fucking kid, and that kid was holding an active soldering iron. What was more, the kid's attention snapped to the robot as soon as it pushed its way into the room.

"Thought you were going to explore?" There was a degree of warmth and delicate joking in the kid's tone, and it ached in the Asset's chest, somehow foreign but familiar. "You give up already?"

The robot beeped at him, a flat, unmistakably negative noise, and suddenly the kid's eyes moved up to look at the Asset and he's staring into a pair of brown eyes that are both intelligent and defiant.

"Hi." The kid's tone isn't very inviting, but the Asset doesn't really merit an invitation. The Asset is only supposed to receive and carry out orders.

He is still surprised that the room doesn't contain a Chair. Just the robot, the kid, his friend, and a lot of electronic components.

The robot beeps at the kid, before spinning around and bee-lining for the Asset. Before anyone could say or do anything, it seizes the Asset's wrist again and drags him over to the kid, holding out his metal arm like a trophy.

The kid blinks down at the exposed plates of the Asset's metal arm. He starts to reach out, but a flinch passes through the Asset, halting the hand before it gets too close. The Asset isn't sure where the reaction came from, but he knows that his Handler would have had no qualms. And the reaction would have resulted in the Chair.

"Sorry," the kid said, letting his hand drop back down to his side. "Sorry, I think DUM-E here thought you were a bit like him because of your metal arm. He's... new." He turns to the robot. "Let him go. We don't know if he wants to be here."

The robot lets out a long, mournful whine and the Asset realizes that his original assessment that there was someone somewhere controlling the movements of the robot was wildly incorrect. "New?" the Asset asks, searching for information, but not sure what he's looking for.

"I made him. Coded him from scratch, too." The kid's chest puffs up a bit and the Asset has a sudden flash of another kid, this one blond.

 _Thin enough to be sickly, the blond kid is staring up at him with bright blue eyes._ _"And you thought I wouldn't make it!" he says._

_"I never said that," another voice replies. This one is just like the strange voice in his head. "I said you would probably collapse before you got there if you tried to walk the whole way with your lungs still recovering. That's why you rode in with Casey."_

_"But I made it. I did!"_

_"And now we're going to go celebrate, then you're going to go to bed and let yourself recover before you kill yourself and me."_

The Asset blinked. He knew the blond kid, but the name was somewhere beyond what he could reach and the voice in his head—so loud before—was currently silent.

"And then you went all mama bear on him," the other kid's friend added. "Then you decided it would be a good idea to make another one of him, and now he thinks everyone with a bit of metal is his new brother."

"Shut up, Rhodey. That's not what happened."

The friend, Rhodey apparently, just smirked. "That is exactly what happened and there's no point in denying it." He turned to the Asset. "Tony created an artificially intelligent robot and turned into the biggest mom I have ever seen."

The kid, Tony, threw a glare over his shoulder. "As I was saying," he began, "I am sorry that DUM-E dragged you here and you don't have to stay if you don't want to and that is the coolest fucking thing I think I've ever seen. I have so many questions, but half of them are probably really private and the rest are probably just rude, so I'll shut up now."

The Asset didn't think the apology he was being offered was supposed to devolve into a full ramble by the end of things, but it did. That wasn't, however, what had grabbed his attention. No, he was stuck on the simplest part of that. 'You don't have to stay if you don't want to'.

A choice. Another choice. If he needed any confirmation that neither the kid nor the robot were part of some HYDRA plot, the fact that both of them let him have a choice was evidence enough.

 _Yeah,_ the voice in his head agreed. _HYDRA knows that giving us a choice would give me a bit of control again. And they really don't want that._

"You can ask your questions."

Tony looked briefly uncertain. "Are you sure? I don't want to make you uncomfortable or anything." He shot a look at his friend Rhodey. "Apparently I have a lack of tact when it comes to sensitive things and don't know when to shut up." This he said as though it was something often repeated. Which, given that Rhodey shrugged, was probably true.

"I'm sure." It wasn't necessarily a lie. The Asset did not understand what might be considered uncomfortable or why, but no one had particularly cared about his comfort, so there was little difference.

"How did you lose your arm?"

Rhodey hissed. "Going right for the jugular? This is why I say you have no tact. Exactly this reason!"

"I don't know," The Asset replied. But there was a sudden blush of cold and he was no longer standing in a lab in Massachusetts in the early Spring. He was standing in the snow staring down at a set of train tracks. Then he felt the sickening weightlessness of a sudden drop. "I think I fell."

"Oh." Tony blinked. "Did it happen when you were young?"

"No, I was—" A sudden blinding pain brought him to his knees.

"Shit!" The kid's voice was distorted and far away. "Rhodey, call emergency services!"

"No!" The Asset managed to bite out through clenched teeth. "No police, no paramedics! Mission failure!"

"What the fuck?" That was from Rhodey, but it stopped him in his tracks, so the Asset would take what he could get.

He could smell something burning faintly, and the panels in his metal arm were spasming in time with every wave of pain.

_"Deviation will not be tolerated, Soldat," a Handler had said in the past. "A good weapon performs as expected or it gets decommissioned."_

The Asset had deviated from the plan. The Asset had not returned to his Handler. Instead, he had followed a robot to a lab and met a kid and his friend. And now he was being decommissioned.

"Fuck. I think something's wrong with his arm."

"Can you fix it?" Rhodey asked, a thread of tension in his voice.

He and the kid locked eyes then and the Asset, unable to form any more words through the pain burning through him, tried to apologize with his eyes.

_"‘cause that's what we do when it's our fault, Stevie. We apologize."_

Tony stared down at him and the Asset saw the moment something changed. "I'm going to fucking try."

The Asset was almost glad when his body finally rejected consciousness. Maybe this time he could die in peace.


	2. Chapter 2

The guy with the metal arm was unconscious and Tony was fairly certain he was having a panic attack. At least, he was pretty sure that feeling as though something was sitting on his chest and having his heart beat faster than a hummingbird's wings counted as a panic attack. If it didn't, it sure as hell should.

The guy—who had never given him a name, Tony realized—was still convulsing a bit on the floor where he fell, and the arm was still giving off the smell of ozone and burning plastic. Panic attack or not, Tony needed to do something about that right now. If the problem was enough to knock the guy unconscious—and he was a pretty big guy—then it would probably be enough to kill him. It was doing its level best to try.

"Rhodey," Tony called, leaning back a bit to get a better balance. "I need you to help me get his jacket off."

"Are you sure we shouldn't call the police or someone?" Even having said that, he was still next to Tony, helping to leverage the guy up so they could get the jacket off. "We don't even know who he is, and that thing he said about mission failure—"

They both stopped when they saw the holstered gun under the jacket, and the knives tucked wherever there was room. Tony knew with a deep and impending sense of dread that this was not a person he should probably be associating with. If the nebulous idea of the right sort of person to associate with existed and could be quantified, Tony was reasonably certain that this person was almost exactly the opposite of that idea. Even unconscious there was an atmosphere of danger surrounding the man. Tony was halfway to agreeing to ship the guy off somehow.

Except that could potentially mean leaving this guy to die and—dangerous or not—Tony wasn't sure he'd be able to live with himself if he stooped to that. "I know it's weird, Rhodey, but he could be dying right now, and I'm pretty sure a hospital wouldn't know what to do about this arm."

"And you do?"

"Well, no, but I have a lot better chance of figuring it out before something gets worse than they would. You know I do."

Rhodey sighed. Tony had fought enough battles with him to know that this sound meant that he was going to give up on this argument. "Fine, but we're taking that shit off him. I'm not going to sit around waiting for you to get stabbed in the heart when you're just trying to help him. And you're going to back off if something starts going wrong. None of that 'I think I can do this impossible thing' bullshit, right?"

“Right.”

They started pulling weapons off of the guy and it was almost comical how many of them there were. Almost. When it stopped being funny, it crossed over into concerning, and then horrifying because why would someone need so many weapons on a university campus? Tony was certain he didn’t want to know.

Once they were reasonably certain most of the weapons were deposited on the jacket out of reach, Tony turned his attention to the arm and everything he needed to do now.

The arm extended a lot farther than Tony had been expecting. He had thought it was some fancy forearm prosthetic or something, but it appeared to go all the way up to his shoulder. Finding no panels other than the interlocking plates on the fore and upper arm, he took the medic approach and cut away the t-shirt using one of the knives they’d taken off the guy. Which is how he found out exactly how far the arm actually extended.

Tony tried to shove away the moment of instant vertigo, looking at how the metal arm was almost growing out of a nest of scar tissue. It was a full arm, shoulder and all, and Tony knew there was something else going on here. This sort of technology was already beyond most people. He pushed the boundaries of possible every day in class, and he hadn't come up with anything nearly as detailed or cruel. While he had designed and built bombs before, they weren't this frankenstein of myoelectric engineering. If something this refined was even in the experimental field, Tony would have known about it, whether the squishy sciences were his field or not. 

The panel was in the shoulder. Tony wasn't sure if he should be messing with it anymore, given it was far beyond what he expected it to be and what he knew to be in production at the time, but he knew there wasn't going to be anyone else. Or if there was someone else who could work on it, they were either the stingiest fucking person in the whole field of science or they were not someone Tony would ever want to meet. Probably both. Weapons oriented or not, Howard would have heard about something like these prosthetics if they were part of a military contract. The alternative was that this was someone else's prototype and, with the cold war going on, that didn't spell a lot of good things for anyone.

There was a hidden catch to open the arm plates and, upon activating it, the arm opened like a flower in bloom. Tony's breath caught as he stared into something that was both the most beautiful bit of medical engineering he had ever seen and the most horrifying. Near the shoulder, where the arm was anchored into the man's body, there was a thin plate with bolts that didn't look anything like medical steel. Besides the evidence of rust, there were also thin trails of blood from each of the anchor points. From the way it crusted against the plates at the bottom, Tony was fairly certain that it had been bleeding ever so slightly from the moment the arm was attached. And he couldn’t tell how long ago that had been.

Tearing his attention away from the brutality of the arm, he forced himself to focus instead on the inner workings of it to find the fault that was causing such pain. Which was a loose wire that had contacted the baseplate because apparently making the internal workings of a metal arm did not extent to making sure none of it would make a good conductor of electricity. The battery for the arm looked vaguely familiar, but Tony wasn't about to focus on that right now. First of all, he needed to disconnect the wire causing all the trouble. And maybe streamline things just a little bit so it wouldn't happen again.

Reaching for the pair of wire cutters and the small slotted screwdriver on his workstation, Tony glanced up at Rhodey. "I'm gonna need that coil of 16-gauge wire and the tube of adhesive from the storage room. And a pair of wire strippers."

He didn't bother to track Rhodey through the room before setting to his first task: disconnecting all the wires from the battery. It really was a wicked looking thing that barely looked like a battery at all. If it hadn't been the only thing glowing with that strange blue light, he never would have thought something so strange could be a battery at all. There was something familiar about it, and Tony wasn't sure if it was déjà vu or if he'd actually seen something like it before.

He clipped the wires connected to it with a degree of prejudice that was probably unnecessary, but well within the vein of righteous fury at the cruelty of such a poor design. Looking at it, it should be state of the art, being far more advanced than any level of prosthetics technology currently on the market. Looking closer, it looked like someone had taken a hydraulics system from the 1950's and adapted it to fit in the space normally taken up by bone and muscle in the arm.

Hydraulics was perhaps a gross oversimplification of what he was looking at. The arm was clearly fully articulated. It moved in all the ways a regular arm should. And, if he was reading the mechanics right, in some ways it really shouldn't be able to move. Most of the mobility came from the shifting plates. Considering how interconnected the whole system was, Tony was surprised that opening the arm had even been a possibility. It certainly didn't appear to be the sort of thing one could take off.

Tony moved quickly and carefully, removing the old wires and replacing them with the new wire Rhodey was cutting for him. Everything needed to be secured, but the wires had to be long enough that they wouldn't pull up and away from the joinings when the arm moved. To ensure the connection actually held, he soldered the wire to the post, then poured a bit of sealing adhesive over the top of it.

In removing the wires, Tony found one that didn't connect to any of the actuators. Instead, it connected to a small panel nearly hanging loose inside the arm. It was, as far as Tony could tell, utterly extraneous and not really intended for the arm. If anything, it looked like an older tracking device.

Tony looked at the man's face, at the base plate leaking blood ever so slowly, and made the executive decision to remove it. He didn't know what the situation was there—nor did he particularly want to know if it produced such casually brutal feats of engineering—but the only people that were typically tracked were spies, or someone that people were trying to control. For whatever reason, in spite of the gun the man had, Tony was pretty sure this man fell into the second category.

"Rhodey, I don't know if this is transmitting any more, but I need you to get rid of it." Tony held up the small electrical panel. "Preferably in a way that will take it away from here and then destroy it."

Rhodey took it from his hand without a word, and Tony trusted him to take care of it. Rhodey understood those sorts of things better.

Checking over his work carefully, Tony barely noticed the moment the strange man's breathing changed. The man hadn't been out for more than five minutes since Tony cut the wires and he was already waking up. Scratch that. Was already awake, as the hand that moved faster than Tony could see closed around his throat.

DUM-E chirped in alarm and confusion, rolling back and forth as though he wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to do. Tony mourned that DUM-E was still encountering violence so early in his development. This was why he had kept the little robot from Howard. This was why he had tried to protect him.

The man stared at him, a sort of blankness in his eyes that was both unsettling and a little bit sad. Tony knew that sort of look. He had seen it too often staring back at him out of the mirrors in the Stark mansion. It was the expression of someone who had separated from themselves in order to survive. The hand around Tony's throat didn't tighten. It wasn't cutting off his air or his circulation; it just held him there.

"I was just fixing your arm," Tony whispered, fighting the instincts screaming at him to fight the grip with everything he had. "It was hurting you."

"Maintenance?" the man asked. His tone was flatter than before, less real almost.

"Just switching out wires." Tony tried to gesture to the burnt and cut wires he had just dropped on the ground beside the metal arm. The man's grip shifted a bit, and his fingers were hot against Tony's skin. He was sure the stranger felt every roll of muscle along his throat as he swallowed. "That's it. I didn't change anything else." The lie tasted sour on his tongue, but Tony had learned to ignore that. He had learned to ignore a lot of lies living with Howard.

Slowly, the man let go of Tony's neck, and the sudden air where his hand had been was a flash of cold. Without looking away from Tony, he reached over to close his metal arm. It snapped into place and the plates rippled ominously. But nothing exploded, and he didn't double over in pain again, so Tony would count that as a win.

"Are you okay?" The question fell from his lips before he could stop it. "It's just... You weren't out that long."

"I never am." The guy blinked suddenly, as though he hadn't meant to speak. He moved to stand, the tattered remains of his shirt hanging off of him.

After a moment, he flexed his arm, checking the range of motion. The plates rippled again, and Tony was sure he could make something that would move even more like a real arm. The man was working with it as best he could and seemed to know just how far he could and couldn't turn it. Tony was sure that one of the moves the man completed caused some strain on the fastenings in the shoulder, but there was no reaction to say the man was in any sort of pain from it. Although, the way the man's face was carefully blank said enough.

Tony wasn't one for sitting still for long, but he waited to move until the man put his jacket on over the remains of his shirt, grabbed his weapons, and left. Because he didn't want to die. Not that he thought the guy would kill him, but there was something much more dangerous about the guy whose immediate response upon waking up was to attack. It didn't speak well for the things he had experienced, and Tony wasn't about to get in the middle of that. Not when he had all of his mechanical engineering courses to take. That sort of thing was for the psychology department to debate, and just passing by the building gave him hives.

Rhodey came back after a bit and Tony had managed to pull himself back to the stool he'd been sitting on before DUM-E came back with the strange man. He didn't yet have the presence of mind to start working on DUM-E's sibling again, so he was just sitting there staring at what he had already accomplished.

"He's gone then?" Rhodey asked.

"Yeah." It came out with a bit of a croak, which Tony supposed made a bit of sense since the man had choked him a bit. "The transmitter?"

"Clipped it to a semi with out of state plates. Not too well, so it should just fall off at some point and get run over. You said it was dead..."

"But better safe than sorry," Tony finished. He sighed heavily and let the adrenaline he'd been running on leach out of him. "Fuck. What did I get us into?"

"Something more interesting than material science, if a lot more dangerous."

Tony squinted at him. Because Rhodey probably knew better than he did what sort of person the guy was. "I think I'm done here for today. I just— I want to go home."

Rhodey didn't say anything, just nodded and helped him put away the supplies they had pulled out. Tony couldn't be more grateful for the fact that his friend had mountains of social competence beyond what Tony himself had developed so far. Rhodey could have easily pointed out that Tony spent more time in the lab than he did at his apartment, which could almost constitute considering the lab his home. But he didn't, and Tony was glad not to have to explain that he wasn't sure he'd be able to breathe in here at the moment. Tomorrow would be a thing all on its own, and there was nothing he could really do about that right now. Other than change into one of the turtleneck sweaters he had for covering up anything that might make people look at him weird. He'd deal with tomorrow when it came, and not a moment before.

"Come on, DUM-E," he said, reaching out to pat the little robot on the topmost limb of his arm. "Let's go home!"

* * *

The Asset was malfunctioning. Part of his instincts demanded he return to base, but he couldn't bring himself to actually go. He could not recall a malfunction of this magnitude ever occurring, but he was sure some of his recent experiences had something to do with it. That, and the little notebook tucked in his jacket with notes on identity.

He still wasn't sure what had prompted him to pick up that particular text. Perhaps the malfunction was deeper than he expected.

Perhaps the void was the source of the malfunction. The voice came from the void, and there was something in it that was both familiar and not. Then there were the flashes of something that he supposed could have been memories, but they were fragmented and untethered in his mind, like they lacked the foundation of what he was supposed to know.

Disturbingly, it was starting to lend credence to the idea that he had an identity that he could not remember, and the voice was somehow tied to it. This was not something he could explore were he to return to HYDRA. And he had not realized the choice he had already made until that thought crossed his mind. He was not going to go back to his Handler or to HYDRA.

It was a self-imposed mission, and he had never had one like this before. There was no intel other than what he knew of HYDRA and what notes he had made on the formation of one's identity. It was a vague direction at best. There was also the voice.

"Mission intel?" he prompted.

_Are you talking to me now?_ the voice asked. _Because usually you don't acknowledge I exist._

"Mission intel required." He needed the voice to answer with something he could use. It wasn't as though he could intimidate or interrogate the voice, as the body was his own. "Mission intel critical for mission success."

_You don't have a mission. You finished your mission._

The Asset frowned. Did the voice not know he had a new mission? Perhaps he should restate mission parameters.

As he attempted to do so, the Asset realized that there were no mission parameters. There was nothing carefully laid out, no plan to execute. Plans required intel, intel apparently required mission parameters, and there were no mission parameters. There was a vague idea of something that hinted at mission parameters, and that was it.

The Asset did not pause or break stride, but his mind had halted briefly, stumbling over the realization that the Asset had an idea. It was a malfunction of the highest degree. The weapon of HYDRA was not capable of independent thought. He had heard his Handler say this to one of his inferiors. The Asset should not have an idea.

But he did.

"Mission parameters: avoid the Handler. Avoid Maintenance. Collect data regarding identity, the formation and the components of." There was more to it, a whole host of thoughts and ideas the Asset didn't have the words or the foundation to begin to describe. It was a general sort of rebellion and he knew the roots of it came from the voice, but it was necessary, nonetheless.

_Huh,_ the voice said. _We might make it out of this hellhole after all._

He found he didn't need to ask for intel, as HYDRA and his Handler were something he understood. The first goal, then, would be finding a place to hide, somewhere HYDRA couldn't track him. He would need to move often to avoid getting found out, but that was hardly different from how he had been trained.

_There's only one mission that matters,_ the voice whispered from the void in his mind. _Escape._

Under the voice, however, was something else, something that gradually became loud enough to understand. _James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant, 32557038. James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant, 32557038._ Over and over it repeated, always using the voice. It was important, somehow the Asset understood that this was important, that this somehow meant escape for the voice.

But it didn't belong to the Asset, and somehow that was surprising. The void was part of him, the voice was part of him, but the escape, the name, they were not. The Asset was not James Buchanan Barnes, and he couldn't help wondering if there was something wrong with that.

But if that was escape for the voice, what constituted escape for him? No Handlers, no HYDRA, but without those, he only had the void and the voice that was not him.

"Mission addendum," he whispered. "Escape."

Now if he could only figure out what that meant.

* * *

James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant, 32557038.

It was a motto, a coping mechanism, and a promise all rolled into one, and it was buried deep in the body that was supposed to be his.

James Buchanan Barnes had not been himself for the last 40 years. It had started with Azzano, and only gotten worse from there. Really, Azzano was what had written his name, rank, and serial number on the very fabric of his soul, but it had also set up everything that would eventually tear him apart.

There were some days when holding on to who he was became the most difficult thing he had ever done, and he almost didn't regret how he had forced himself to survive. HYDRA was trying to tear his identity out by the roots, so he would let them think they succeeded. He was Bucky, he was a Howling Commando, and he was Steve Rogers' best friend. He knew how to pick his battles because that punk sure as hell didn't.

He still lost himself along the way, pieces he wasn't sure he would ever get back. And every time HYDRA reactivated him, it was harder and harder to slip back into the driver's seat of his own body. Every time he fought back, it was worse. He'd lose another part of himself, another set of precious memories would disappear into the darkness and the blank body he'd left behind was becoming more and more what he didn't want it to be.

How exactly does someone save themselves when they can't get through to themselves?

This was why he was shocked that the Winter Soldier was taking the initiative first. It was also the first time he had considered that the wall he had erected between the precious bits of his identity and the rest of his mind had cut off more than just his control. Whatever was left behind was analytical, practical, unrestrained by a discernible moral code, but it was functional and now it was making decisions that didn't line up with what HYDRA wanted.

It didn't make sense. The Winter Soldier wasn't him, but he sort of was. And Bucky wasn't sure what had brought the Winter Soldier to the decision that he wouldn't return to HYDRA as ordered.

Not that he was complaining, of course. Every moment away from HYDRA was a moment it became easier to seize control of his body again. It was a chance to maybe reclaim the parts of himself that had disappeared.

But the decision not to go back had come out of nowhere. He couldn't track the thoughts on the other side of the wall, so he didn't try most of the time. When he did try, it was rapid-fire situational analysis and relevant observations, and there wasn't anything useful for him in that. He didn't need to know that a room had 17 exit vectors and 76 different objects that could be turned into a weapon if necessary, or who in the room was most likely to be a threat. Whatever moment of clarity the Winter Soldier had, it was past, and there was no way for Bucky to track it down now.

The mission parameters were strange. Like the Soldier hadn't known what he wanted exactly. And wasn't it weird to think that the walking calculator that took over his body wanted something? The whole way the Winter Soldier interacted with the world was different, like he wasn't human.

But now it seemed like he could be human after all. Or, at the very least, he was becoming human. Bucky wasn't sure what that would mean for him. It was already difficult to take back control of his body when there was hardly something there to operate it. What would happen if he had another personality to contend with?

And, perhaps more terrifying, this personality was trying to learn from him. The Winter Soldier had asked him for information. He was trying to adapt to the situation without Bucky's knowledge and personality, and it was working somehow, but he was also trying to use parts of Bucky to cover the gaps.

Suddenly Bucky wondered just how solid this wall between them was. He certainly didn't want to wake up one day and find out that everything he had been trying to preserve had been taken by the other person growing in his head.

At the very least, Bucky wasn't about to go down without a fight.


End file.
